Lars Onsager (November 27, 1903 – October 5, 1976) was a Norwegian–American physical chemist and theoretical physicist, winner of the 1968 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He had the Gibbs Professorship of Theoretical Chemistry at Yale University.
Lars Onsager was born in Kristiania (today's Oslo), Norway. His father was a lawyer. After completing secondary school in Oslo, he attended the Norwegian Institute of Technology (NTH) in Trondheim, graduating ...
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Lars Onsager (November 27, 1903 – October 5, 1976) was a Norwegian–American physical chemist and theoretical physicist, winner of the 1968 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He had the Gibbs Professorship of Theoretical Chemistry at Yale University.
Lars Onsager was born in Kristiania (today's Oslo), Norway. His father was a lawyer. After completing secondary school in Oslo, he attended the Norwegian Institute of Technology (NTH) in Trondheim, graduating as a chemical engineer in 1925.
In 1925 he arrived at a correction to the Debye–Hückel theory of electrolytic solutions, to specify Brownian movement of ions in solution, and during 1926 published it. He traveled to Zürich, where Peter Debye was teaching, and confronted Debye, telling him his theory was wrong. He impressed Debye so much that he was invited to become Debye's assistant at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH), where he remained until 1928.
Eventually in 1928 he went to the United States of America to take a faculty...
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